Managing the Media in an Era of Round-the-Clock News: Notes from India's first tele-war

In an age of instant global communication, governments have refined their public diplomacy, particularly in the way warfare is covered on television, to market their version of events effectively to their domestic as well as the international viewing public. This article briefly examines television coverage of key post-Cold-War military interventions in the era of round-the-clock news. It explores the growing tendency among the United States dominated global news networks to generally follow the US government's foreign policy agenda by often presenting military actions as "humanitarian intervention". This type of coverage is placed in the context of a new era of news management, which, it is argued, was pioneered by the US military in the 1991 "clean" air war against Iraq and subsequent US-led military interventions in the 1990s. The article goes on to analyse the international implications of such coverage, arguing that, given the global reach and influence of US visual media, this type of framing can also shape the wider view of a war. The article then examines how the US approach to news management has been adapted elsewhere, focusing on the 1999 border conflict between India and Pakistan over Kargil - the first television war in South Asia.